Make Money from Blogs » Image

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 7

ashish — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:07:39 +0000

The previous post (optimizing sections inside your post structure) talked about some assorted steps you can to optimize your post (such as permalinks, bread crumbs (example, the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin), speeding up your site, and so on).
This post looks at optimizing the images on your site for better SEO. I can just hear some of you saying, Huh ! Why do we need to do something for images. Well, consider that Google Image Search drives a large number of people (on one of my blogs, it drives more than 70% of visitors, and this is not a photo blog), and Google, when displaying search results, many times shows images as a part of the search results, right near the top. If you were able to get your blog in there through some image optimization, would it not be worth it ? Well, if you are convinced, here goes:
- Number one item, you should ensure that all your images have an ‘Alt’ tag filled out properly. A search engine cannot read the image, and can only find out what the image is by the alt tag, and by the context in which the image appears. And of course, you earn credit from some visitors who are visually challenged and use these tags to figure out what the image wants.
- If you are not able to add ‘Alt’ tag properties / text to your images manually, make sure that they are not blank. Use a plugin such as the ‘SEO Friendly Images’ (link – automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes).
- This one is more speculative, but it is believed that if you host your image on a popular image sharing platform such as Picasa Web or Flickr, then you get a slight boost to your SEO rankings for the image.
- If possible, ensure that your images are in a separate folder that is accessible by search engines
- Don’t put too many images per page, so if you load 100 or so images, then it is taken negatively
- Make sure that you change the image file names that come from the camera and make it something distinctive. Don’t use something like P121765.jpg, instead make it something ‘Photo of Sydney Opera House from water level’. This helps in search engine ranking and gives a boost to the image ranking
- Now, something that is different. Look at the words surrounding a photo / picture, and make sure that the photo or picture sits in a section of text that describes it some degree and has some keywords in it. This also boost the ability of the Search engines image search crawler to rank the images higher.
- If somebody requests you for being able to use your photos or a thumbnail of your photos, then consider whether the photo is exclusive enough. If you feel that it is fine to do so, ensure that there is a link to your original blog post under the photo in the other site, since this helps in giving your link popularity a boost.
- When you are giving a link to your photos somewhere, don’t use the words ‘link’ or ‘click here’, instead use descriptive text as the anchor since doing this naming also helps in SEO
- Ensure that your photos have a standard aspect ratio, since search engines show thumbnails and these thumbnails are easier to show when they are of a standard size.

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Using Photos in your blog posts

ashish — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:49:06 +0000

I believe I have mentioned this in past blog posts, but more in the nature of a tip rather than an actual focused post. For some time now, I have been reviewing the sources of page visits on the Gadgets blog that I maintain, called Ultra Cool Gadgets (link). Sitemeter provides a simple set of statistics for how the users come to the blog, and if you look at the following Sitemeter site (link), you will get an idea of where a large section of users come to my site from.
Surprisingly, a number of users to my site come from URL’s starting with http://images.google.com …; these are people coming from Google’s Image search. How do I manage to get people to come to my site from searching for images ? This was not intentional when I started, but I had made it a point to ensure that with every gadget that I posted, I also posted an image. But it was not just an image, I also made sure that I did the following:
1. Made sure that the image contained an alt description. Most tools that allow you to upload an image to your Blogger blog do not provide a default to add the alt tag (although I believe posting the URL for an image in WordPress gives you an option for entering the description of the image). You need to modify the code for the image to ensure that the alt keyword has a description added to it.
2. This tip is slightly lower in importance from the previous tip, but try and make sure that the name of the image is also relevant. This is also starting to matter in terms of the discoverability of your images via Google Image search.
Once you follow these simple rules and ensure that images are posted along with the blog post, you increase the chances of making your images being found by more people, leading to a higher traffic for your blog. However, do not stuff images that are not relevant, and do not add description in the alt tag that is false, since that might lead to your images getting a penalty associated with them.
Over a period of time, Google automatically finds these images and adds them to its Images search database.

Promoting your Photo Blog (contd..)

ashish — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:18:25 +0000

An earlier post covered some tips for promoting a photo blog. This post covers some more tips that I learned while researching this topic of trying to promote a photo blog.
1. Ensure that your site does not have a robots.txt file that could prevent the search engine crawlers from indexing your site
2. Ensure that some keywords are there in the ‘alt’ description for the image file. At the same time, do not go overboard.
3. It has been found that if you change the filename of your file (from the filename generated by cameras) to something more descriptive, it has a beneficial effect on your images being indexed by Google Image search.
4. This tip is more about using Adsense to determine how Google is using your image. If you place an Adsense ad near your images (not to the right or left though), then the Ad gives you an idea of the keywords that are getting associated with your image. You may need to experiment with the text near the image as well as the text on the ‘alt’ tags so that you finally find the correct keyword association.
5. If you want to determine how Google Image search is indexing your site, there is an easy way. You should go to www.google.com/images, and then search for your site by typing ‘site:www.yoursitename.com. The results will tell you as to how Google Image is indexing your site.
6. If you need to determine whether the Google Image Bot is visiting your site, then check whether your site visitors contains this piece of text:
“Googlebot-Image/1.0″
This determines whether your site is visited by the Google Images search engine
7. The larger the image, the more time it takes for people to download your images, and makes it more difficult. Instead, keep your images of a regular size with the maximum dimension of either 1024 or 1200
8. If you place the image on a page that has a high PR rank, the image is likely to place higher in image search

Photo Blog promotion – post to search engines and photo directories

ashish — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:01:01 +0000

In the previous post, I had mentioned some tips on how to promote your photo blog. One of the good ways to promote your photo blog is to post to important search engines and to other photo directories. Now, you can find many such photo directories on the net to post to, the list below is the one that I am using to add my photo blogs. Your mileage can vary, and in some cases, you may have some specialized photo directories (such as if you are having a lot of photos of the Netherlands, you would also have some photo directories that specialized on the Netherlands).
Well, here are some of the directories and search engines to post to. For search engines, all the research I have done indicates that there is no special way to submit to the Image search, you need to submit to the generic search.

Google Search (link)

Bing Search (link)

Yahoo Search Submit (link)

You can use Free Submission Websites that submit to multiple search engines, such as Submit Express (link). However, nowadays search engines can easily find your sites, and do not really like these bulk submission programmes.

Yahoo Media Search (link)

Dmoz.org (link)

Alltop.com (link)

Directories:

Photography and Photographers (link)

Photo Clicks Pro (link)

Free Photo Gallery (link). Select the required directory, and submit from there.

PhotoLinks (link)

Blogged.com (link)

Photography Directory Project (link)

PhotographersIndex.com (link). For photographers.

Photography Homepages (link)

International Photo Gallery Project (link)

All Things Photo.com (link)

Library of Photography (link)

Photo200.com (link)

http://www.directory.hickerphoto.com/ (link)

Photo.net (link)